From the Spring of Nations to the Arab Spring Democratic Waves in Historical Perspective Seva Gunitsky Assistant Professor Dept. of Political Science University of Toronto Draft: August 2016 Rough draft. Comments welcome at seva1000@gmail.com Abstract Sweeping democratic waves have been a recurring feature of modern regime change. But these cascades of reform have varied widely in their speed, reach, and intensity, impeding the creation of a general framework of democratic di↵usion. I present a typology of di↵usion that focuses on recurring causal mechanisms and highlights the parallels and contrasts among episodes of democratic di↵usion. Waves are classified according to whether they were vertical or horizontal, and whether they were driven by contagion and emulation. I define these terms and classify a variety of democratic waves according to these categories. I then lay out the often-ignored yet crucial mechanisms of negative feedback (or counter-di↵usion) that accompany the process, focusing on 1) the collapse of ad hoc coalitions, 2) autocratic adaptation, 3) cognitive heuristics, and 4) shifting systemic pressures. Together, these factors help explain a persistent puzzle in the study of democratization – why waves of di↵usion inevitably lead to partial or total rollback and collapse. The Arab Spring, for all its seemingly unique triumphs and disappointments, was only the latest in a long series of democratic waves. Over the last two centuries, democracy has expanded around the world through abrupt cascades of reform and revolution, sweeping across borders to produce swift and often unexpected bursts of domestic transformation. From the Atlantic Wave of the late eighteenth century to the more recent upheavals in the Middle East, these clusters of democratization have been a recurring element of modern regime change (see Table 1, next page). 1